Go and Back: Fiction and Reality

Go and Back: Fiction and Reality
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian,Lisbon
Curator:Christine Van Asche
Architect:Didier Fiuza Faustino
Artists:Laurent Grasso, Rachel Reupke, David Claerbout, Stan Douglas, Melik Ohanian, Chris Marker, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Jordi Colomer, Isaac Julien, Alexandre Estrela.

This is a story of a woman marked by an image from her past.

The exhibition aims to reflect upon some modes of use of the moving image on the international art scene according to the curator, blurring the frontier between fiction and documentary genre.
It was a commission made by the Gulbenkian foundation to Pompidou's curator for new media Christine Van Asche, whose recent exhibition on new media works from the collection on view at Lisbon's rival institution made a huge success. Not an unimportant fact in a time when institutions, lacking governmental support and facing the disappearance of the bourgeois subject, starve to get more visitors in order to run their programme.
Fiction and Reality, however, was on display for as long as six months.
The reasons for this are ambiguous. If the father of the foundation, an Armenian émigré and art lover, knew what was going on within the walls of the museum's headquarters and exhibition spaces he would begin to turn in his grave.
The strategy of extending the exhibition's time-frame could be perceived as an attempt to position the museum (a private foundation with public interest) as a central institution, giving it (spectral) visibility by displaying the desirable new media works with an emphasis on the new. Apart from that, this is also a remarkable (or not so) business model of how to earn a lot of money in spite of moderate ticket price and ensure the profit even before the exhibition opens.
The exhibition design by Didier Fiuza Faustino follows the logic of separate units, designed according to the attributes of each singular work and installed one after another in a linear fashion, thus resembling the narrative structure of most of the pieces in the show.
The overall view is interrupted by the CCTV, which is, apart from their formal links, the only interconnecting, but also unnecessary element between the individual pieces. At the entrance, the visitors are informed that from there on, they will be a part of the show. This in fact sounds no more comforting than the awareness of close-circuited public spaces from our quotidian environments.
To quote the opinion of the architect, as expressed in roundtable discussion, the intention was to create an experience similar to eating sushi, when we have a bit of gengibre before moving on to another kind of fish, in order to neutralize the taste and get ready for the new one. Unfortunately, the experience was more like going from one store to another in a shopping centre, except that here you face the foundation's collection of modern art on the other side of the hall.
Exhibited works draw on a large number of references, ranging from blockbusters to the suspension of disbelief, in a general movement proceeding from fiction towards documentary, with a film positioned in the centre of the exhibition.
La jettée, the endlessly quoted film consisting of still black and white images and a voice-over narration, often examined in regard to its references to Nazism, is essentially a tale about lost love. A temporal vertigo that marks an end of a certain paradigm.
Destaque goes to Isaac Juliens' Fantôme Afrique, a triple screen cinematic exploration of the phantom notions such as colonial history, set in Ouaga, the capital of both African cinematography and Burkina Faso, with its Place des cinéastes, where the failure of the modernist project is inscribed in architecture. Employing contemporary dance and non-linear narration, it is again a story about love. More precisely, it is about lovers moving through the city like phantoms, marked by an image from the past, destined to never meet, since spectres are invisible (even to each other). Here, a visible shift towards spatial paradigm can be observed.
The so-called international selection of artists is actually quite Eurocentric, and even here one part of Europe seems to be excluded, despite of the many artists who have been employing cinematographic references in their work since the early eighties. Do they need a visa to enter the exhibition? Do they need a visa to become artists?
Far more intriguingthan Go and Back is the current artistic project held at the same institution, the E-flux video rental, which enables the public access to approximately nine hundred artists' videos. In the words of Anton Vidokle: It's about circulation ...
The first video presented at the screening was by no coincidence 'An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is No Artist'.

She knew that what she saw was the moment of her death.

*The beginning and the end of this text corresponds to the beginning and end of the film La Jettée, one of the most paradigmatic works in the history of moving images.
Besides providing quite an unusual frame to the art critic,it also introduces another slight shift in perception for those who know the 'original material'. In other words: with the transfer from film to text a first person account of a man got female attributes.